New Years, New Beginnings: Addition and Subtraction

Setting a New Years resolution is an empowering tradition many people participate in. Typically it's to quit smoking, drinking or other bad habits; or it could be to start eating healthier, exercising, or other good habits. Essentially the goal is to improve your life by either adding something that makes you happy, or subtracting something that makes you unhappy.

Balloon Visualization Technique

Visualization is an excellent exercise for our minds. It can help with numerous things in daily life. It can help with memory recall, remembering where you left your keys or set your phone down is a nice life hack to have. It helps with proprioception (knowing where in space your body parts are), which is great for not stubbing your toes, falling up stairs, or hitting your funny-bone when no one's around to laugh. My personal favourite, is visualizing the process of Pinterest DIYs to see if they're made-to-fail or if there's an actual possibility it'll work. I'm not going to list them all, but visualization helps in a lot of little ways, and it's the little things that make up life, isn't it?

Breathwork to Help Beat Holiday Stress

Have Happy Holidays, not Stressful Seasons Greetings

It's flu & stress season, everyone! If you're one of the lucky ones, you get to avoid one or the other, if you're super-lucky, you get to avoid both; as for the rest of us, we've got to deal with both. Fortunately, the flu doesn't last very long. However, stress can grow and stick around for a little while longer.

Three Thoughts to Get You on the Mat

For the days you're just not feelin' it

Sometimes you wake up on the wrong side of the bed, sometimes you feel drained or foggy, sometimes you just feel like a big ole personification of 'Blah'. Lets face it, some days just suck. But that doesn't necessarily mean you have to let it suck you in and bring you down. 
Here's a few thoughts for the days you'll need to drag yourself to the yoga mat.

Trick Your Tapas by Setting Samskaras

Alt. Title: Develop Discipline by Hacking Your Habits

Tapas: Sanskrit for 'discipline' | Samskaras: Sanskrit for 'mental impressions left by all thoughts, actions and intents'

More often than expected, someone would tell me how disciplined I am with my yoga practice. Frankly, I find it surprising because I am the least disciplined person I've ever met. I'm not being modest when I respond with the truth: it's just a habit. It's just that the specifics of that habit have blossomed as time went on; the ritual to ingrain this habit has changed.

5 Minutes of Savasana for 5 Days

Ending my daily yoga routine with savasana [corpse pose] is definitely something I struggle with. If I were to guess, it's probably about a third of the time I actually end my routine with savasana for any amount of time. Realizing this, I decided to make a mini-goal: focus on doing at least 5 minutes of savasana for the next five days. Lets see how Day Five differs from Day One.

Meditation Intimidation

Typically, the word "meditation" conjures up images of a still mind, steady breath, calm face, in a seemingly unbelievable, supposedly [insert air quotes here] comfortable [and here] sitting position. I think that's why meditation seems almost intimidating to most; it sure did for me. That was, until the teacher for  my high school Word Religion class introduced a lovely concept called walking meditation. 

Greetings, Blogspot!

@yogastruggles (originally from Instagram) is expanding!